The idea of exploring a “place” and returning to one’s “hometown” and starting a corresponding new life has recently been gaining traction in China. For people in China, having endured the most drastic and longest lockdowns during the pandemic worldwide, this has become a way of finding solace and a measure of hope in times of economic and political uncertainty.

“The nearby” as a scope of seeing is a concept put forth by Chinese social anthropologist Xiang Biao. Having studied the global movement and drifting of people in contemporary society, and the mental problems and crises that result from it, Xiang concluded that holding on to one’s small world, and seeing the world through “the nearby” is most important.

On the one hand, people can rely on the mutual support from friends in this nearby space. On the other hand, Xiang states that “the nearby is a lived space where one encounters people with diverse backgrounds on a regular basis,”, thus forming the everyday network of real society.

Claiming back our lives in ‘the nearby’

The people within a 100-meter circle around the apartment building where you live — be it other tenants, the security guard in the lobby, the noodle soup stall owner down the street, the janitor and cleaners or food delivery people — constitute your “nearby”. Yet, we who are constantly online surfing the internet, most often overlook this “nearby”.

Xiang points out that due to the disappearance of “the nearby”, the real public space and our consciousness of being connected to it also vanishes.

Chinese sociologist Yan Fei, who teaches at the Department of Sociology of Tsinghua University in Beijing, also found in his research that, in the age of globalization and digitization, “the nearby” could serve as a method to find authenticity amid change, build deep relations with the world, and retake control over our lives.

The theory of “the nearby” holds that we must extricate ourselves from the metanarrative of globalization and from the perception of the world through a commerce-dominated internet. We need to return our focus to the people who share our lives in physical proximity, face this world that might not share our stance and probably lacks efficiency but is real, to find the cornerstone for our individual lives again.

A related phenomenon is perceiving “place”, returning to one “hometown” or native place.

During the past three decades, China’s entire “hometown” world became “the world’s factory”. Resources in the form of nature, manpower, and cultural traditions were exhausted in the process. China’s race to make it into the global market was fueled by a neglect of human rights and high energy consumption. As the country experienced rapid economic growth, the countryside was not only abandoned but also depleted over a long period so that it became a synonym for backwardness and conservative attitudes.

In popular films such as Chinese film director Jia Zhangke’s “hometown trilogy” (Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2002)) and Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003) and Blind Mountain (2007), the rural villages are characterized by the pain and sorrow that city dwellers associate with their distant hometowns. The phrase “Everyone’s hometown is on the demise”, the title of a 2015 book by Chinese author Ran Yunfei, has been a familiar expression in China for more than a decade. It still touches countless people.

But what if, after leaving home for greener pastures in far-flung places, one does not find a better life, or the world far away from home is crumbling, too? If even people in the big cities opt out of the rat race by “lying flat”, why then stay in the city and put up with high living costs?

Yet, just being able to return is already a luxury. Not everyone has a hometown to return to where home and family still exist, where the social fabric is intact.

Therefore, many turn to option three as an alternative, leaving the big city for temporary shelter in places with lower living costs.

As I wrote in an earlier column, Dali in Yunnan Province has become a safe haven for people of different generations.

During the Lunar New Year holiday, various friends from China suggested that I watch the popular Chinese comforting drama Meet Yourself (2023). In the series’ pilot, the female lead character Xu Hongdou quits her career job at an upscale Beijing hotel after her best friend dies of pancreatic cancer. Xu travels to Dali in Yunnan Province, 3,000 kilometers away from the capital, to come to terms with the death, and starts a new life there.

In mainstream society, people who have lost meaning in their lives invariably move to Yunnan to live their rural dream.

As a direct effect of the TV show, the shooting locations in Yunnan towns were overrun by 50 to 60 times as many tourists during the Lunar New Year season as during ordinary times. I am afraid that during the holidays this year, half of all travelers picked Yunnan as their destination.

A hometown dream built before a fake background

Is Yunnan the utopia that fills the gap between the big city where people can no longer make it, and the hometown, to which they can not longer return? In the 2021 TV drama Light Clouds and Winds, the COVID-19 pandemic does not exist at all; not a single person wearing a face mask appears in the drama.

The realities of rural life do not exist in the TV shows. About 36 percent of China’s population lives in rural villages, and 1 out of five people is older than 60. At the same time, medical resources in the countryside account only for 13.2 percent of the national healthcare system.

The TV shows mention the social problems in the countryside such as a lack of jobs, young people leaving for work in the cities, and children being left to the care of relatives only in passing.

On top of that, these realities do not appear to be very much of a problem. The lead character returns home to open a coffee shop or a bookstore without facing any struggle.

The more authentic a story is that develops before a false background, the more it becomes a prop to make the false background more perfect. This is probably the biggest risk we face when we speak about “the nearby” and “hometown” in a place where there is no freedom and where political problems cannot be discussed.

Originally, they were supposed to help us reclaim our autonomy, rebuild life in a bottom-up approach. But as the metanarrative gets smarter, these concepts often end up being co-opted and packaged as attractive consumer choices that allow one to vent one’s feelings, relax mentally, and find comfort, moving even further away from reality.

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Translated by Susanne Ganz
Edited by TC Lin
Uploaded by Ian Huang